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IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing

Posted by Unknown on from the finally-gonna-get-that-sweet-workstation dept.

New submitter HAL11000 was the first of many to write with news that IBM and others have formed a new consortium to license the POWER architecture to third parties "IBM puts up POWER architecture for licensing and announces the OpenPower Consortium with Google, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Tyan." Quoting El Reg: "The plan, according to McCredie, is to open up the intellectual property for the Power architecture and to allow customizations by licensees, just like ARM Holdings has done brilliantly with its ARM processors ... Nvidia is very excited about the prospects of marrying Power processors and Nvidia GPUs for both HPC and general purpose systems. ... Tyan will presumably be working on alternative motherboards to the ones that IBM has manufactured for its own use." There are mentions of the POWER firmware being "open sourced," but it is unclear if that actually means Open Source or something more like the Open Group's definition of open (vendors only).

78 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Phones by Therad · · Score: 1

    Only if it is a sony-made phone.

  2. A Little Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Shouldn't they have done this while Apple was still using the PPC? At number of developers and developer tools available for PPC back then has to be orders of magnitude higher than it is today. Better late than never?

    1. Re:A Little Late? by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 1

      Better late than never..... but better never late.

      Are IBM hoping that people migrate to AIX or something? (good luck with that!)

      --
      READY.
      PRINT ""+-0
    2. Re:A Little Late? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      PowerPC cores are incredibly more ubiquitous than you probably believe. They show up all over the place. Hell, Motorola Cellphones had old tired PPC cores in them for some time, since as a contributor Moto had a license to make embedded PPC chips. And of course, it's well-known that there's a tri-core PPC in the Xbox 360. There's also a castrated little PPC core in the front of the PS3's processor, where there was a MIPS core in the PS2's. And there's a ton of little MIPS-based portable computers out there, but in recent times their sales have been cannibalized by ARM. There's no reason to believe that there couldn't be a ton of little PPC-based portables out there, if PPC were licensed like ARM. Now, allegedly, it will be. Probably too little too late, though.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:A Little Late? by chowdahhead · · Score: 2

      I believe many automotive onboard computers are PPC based also.

    4. Re:A Little Late? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Informative

      Are IBM hoping that people migrate to AIX or something? (good luck with that!)

      A few days ago on the Fedora homepage was announcement of the full release of Fedora 19 for IBM Power, presumably with Linux 3.10. You can get RHEL 6 if you want support and certainly there are debian and netbsd ports in various states. If there's a market for the hardware, the software is ready.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    5. Re:A Little Late? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      And spacecraft because there are rad-hard parts available.

      The thing I wonder about is all the years of ARM driving for low power (Intel has done this too) while IBM Power (uppercase) focused on being really fast and powerful for server work. Either they expect to buy a company that has the expertise to reduce Power's power consumption or they expect one of these companies to license the design and do it themselves, though I'm not sure why Power's architecture is better enough than ARM's for such a company to do so.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    6. Re:A Little Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It didn't help that Intel and AMD were burning 200 Watts and PPC was at about 15 Watts and people expected similar performance. Couple that with Motorola sucking wind and a major memory design flaw/feature on an embedded processor (I gave up at the 7447) and it was doomed.

      PPC developers rarely hit the metal directly,

      Could not be less true. People liked the PPC because you could get to assembly easily and it was not difficult to squeeze 90% performance out of it. The programming strategy was so easy compared to other options at the time.

      The problem IBM has is that it creates these alliances so it can go through alliance customer lists and get introductions to decision makers. I fear for NVidia and Tyan because they are going to lose business and customer confidence. Once IBM is in the customer's room they will uninvite the alliance members and divide a sale. I've seen it first hand.

    7. Re:A Little Late? by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Informative

      POWER has been been 64bit and massively out-of-order superscalar for years where ARM is only just beginning to enter the market. Simply put POWER is not in the same market as ARM, but in the same market as x86. Which means it is Intel (and AMD) who is killing them.

    8. Re:A Little Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And of course, it's well-known that there's a tri-core PPC in the Xbox 360. There's also a castrated little PPC core in the front of the PS3's processor

      Whoa there. If you're going to defend PowerPC, you should acknowledge that the PPC core in the Xbox360 is the same core as in the PS3. The PS3's main work is done by the 7 vector processors (alternately called "APU"s, "SPUs", "SPC"s, depending on who's talking), but the CPU core is the same repipelined Power4 with a VMX unit on it. My memory fails me, but there may be a minor change in the VMX for the 360. Microsoft didn't want to spend the time on custom vector units, so they just asked for enough cores off the shelf to meet their objectives.

      Refer to The Race for a New Game Machine for more details if you're truly curious. It was written by two of the lead designers/architects of both CPUs.

    9. Re:A Little Late? by robthebloke · · Score: 1

      (alternately called "APU"s, "SPUs", "SPC"s, depending on who's talking)

      SPE = Synergistic Processing Elements.

    10. Re:A Little Late? by mlts · · Score: 4, Informative

      POWER7 has some nice advantages over x86/amd64:

      1: A feature (mainly for database licensing) to turn off half the cores, let the cores working use the cache on the cores turned off, and crank the clock speed up. Performance in that mode is almost the same as turning on all cores, but these results can vary on what is bring run.

      2: Decent bang per watt.

      3: A different CPU architecture with a different set of bugs. This helps for secure applications, so if there might be a F0 0F-like bug lurking around, the bad guys would have to find it for IBM's architecture.

      4: More registers to use and abuse.

      5: Very good virtualization capability. Every POWER7 box thrown out is made from the ground up with a hypervisor built into both FSPs. One can just use a single machine with access to all hardware, or add VIO servers [1] and LPAR it out.

      [1]: VIO servers are small AIX [2] instances that pass disk I/O and networking through to the other VMs. On VMWare ESXi, they would be roughly equivalent to a VM appliance that does routing between virtual switches.

      [2]: More of a variant of AIX, called IOS... however, oem_setup_env gives you a root prompt if needed.

    11. Re:A Little Late? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Whoa there. If you're going to defend PowerPC, you should acknowledge that the PPC core in the Xbox360 is the same core as in the PS3.

      Not only am I not defending PowerPC or POWER (I give a shit if it lives or dies, which hopefully will happen on its own merits, ha ha) but the PPC core in the 360 is not precisely the same as the one in the PS3, though they're based on the same design. The one in the PS3 is stripped down further and then glued to the vector units. The core in the 360 is faster, there's three of them, they are symmetric and they have slightly more features.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re:A Little Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And what has any of that to do with the POWER architecture?
      PowerPC != POWER!

      I thought this was a geek site. Then again, that was a looong time ago.

    13. Re:A Little Late? by Narishma · · Score: 1

      As far as I know, the only difference between the PPE and a Xenon core is that the later has a modified VMX (AltiVec) unit. They upgraded the vector register count to 128 per thread compared to 32 per thread on the PPE and they replaced a few vector instructions with others that are more useful in gaming.

      --
      Mada mada dane.
    14. Re:A Little Late? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      Back when Apple first came out with PowerPC (the PowerPC 601 based 6100, 7100, 8100) the Ford EEC controllers were PowerPC 40x cores.

      We had "PowerPC Inside!" marketing stickers (I worked for the campus Apple Reseller) that i wanted to stick on random Ford cars for the hell of it. I never did, didn't want to screw up their paint jobs.

      Im sure there still are PowerPC applications in cars. And think of the 68000/DragonBall. A family that came out in 1979 but was sold until the 2000's as an embedded controller.

    15. Re:A Little Late? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Ah, good point. Intel is way far ahead in low-power ILP/OOE, but they don't license their architecture, so yeah, there could be a market.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    16. Re: A Little Late? by niftymitch · · Score: 1
      Spot on. The PPC core is well received in the embedded world. The ARM folk have powered up and moved into space once owned by PPC. With newer process the PPC could move down and put a lot of pressure on ARM.

      The 64bit ARM is a reach.

      Now if someone could build a five watt PPC Raspberry-Pi/BBB with 2x more RAM and GigE for five bucks less the landscape would shift in no time.

      --
      Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
    17. Re: A Little Late? by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I do like POWER and PowerPC more than ARM. But ARM get the leg up by licensing to third parties. Still PowerPC still has the edge in higher performance (and power sucking) applications.

    18. Re: A Little Late? by citizenr · · Score: 1

      Now if someone could build a five watt PPC Raspberry-Pi/BBB with 2x more RAM and GigE for five bucks less the landscape would shift in no time.

      Realtek makes RTD1186 750mhz mips + PowerVR SGX 531 + 1Gbit + USB 3.0 + hdmi + sata + pcie, and it costs $3
      That doesnt mean shit because Realtek is one of those companies (like Broadcom) that never ever give out documentation.

      --
      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    19. Re:A Little Late? by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      1: A feature (mainly for database licensing) to turn off half the cores, let the cores working use the cache on the cores turned off, and crank the clock speed up. Performance in that mode is almost the same as turning on all cores, but these results can vary on what is bring run.

      How's that going to be useful in a free software context? It sounds almost akin to a bug.

    20. Re: A Little Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The PowerPC in the PS3 was very crippled. It was in-order, and a single core with hyper threading. The idea was that it would only be responsible for setting up the SPUs and making them do all the work. In practice, the core wasn't even up to that in some cases.

      So you definitely shouldn't take the PS3 PowerPC core as an example of a typical PowerPC.

    21. Re:A Little Late? by Master+Moose · · Score: 2

      Better late than never..... but better never late.

      Better late than pregnant

      --
      . . .gone when the morning comes
    22. Re:A Little Late? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Wasn't POWER already an open architecture?

    23. Re: A Little Late? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Realtek makes RTD1186 750mhz mips + PowerVR SGX 531 + 1Gbit + USB 3.0 + hdmi + sata + pcie, and it costs $3

      Cheapest finished product on ebay is eighty bucks...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    24. Re:A Little Late? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Simply put POWER is not in the same market as ARM, but in the same market as x86.

      Well, POWER covers a lot of ground. PowerPC is derived from POWER, and there have long been embedded PowerPC cores. The problem is that they worked on an old-world licensing model where each new product required a new license, and that license pretty much had to be negotiated with Motorola because that's who was doing low-power PowerPC.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    25. Re:A Little Late? by dfghjk · · Score: 1

      Apple's computers at the time WERE significantly slower than entry level PCs. That ship had sailed long before.

      PPC was very successful in embedded where developers do "hit the metal directly" so you have no idea what you're talking about. PPC was quite nice to program in assembly.

      You can't license an x86 core from Intel or AMD to integrate into a larger chip design. You can do that with ARM. Power offers a "significant performance advantage" in that respect. It seems you don't get it, so it's a good thing you post as AC. ;)

      Who says "boxen" any more and why did they ever?

    26. Re:A Little Late? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      As far as I know, the only difference between the PPE and a Xenon core is that the later has a modified VMX (AltiVec) unit.

      Well, in the Cell the SPEs are supposed to do the vector processing, so that makes sense. But as I've written here before, it's an extremely puzzling decision on Sony's part. Did they just believe some total bullshit from IBM about how great Cell would be? That would be fairly ironic given the impact of Sony's bullshit about how great PS2 would be on the Dreamcast, to add to the irony of following up a console for which developers complained about difficulty of development due to a wacky architecture (the PS2) with another console with wacky architecture. At least, as I predicted, they did not make that mistake again with the PS4.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    27. Re: A Little Late? by citizenr · · Score: 1

      Chip is $3.
      Chinese are able to churn out $40 android tv sticks using $10 Rockchip chips, but are unable to make anything close to that price range using 3x cheaper Realtek - because Realtek hates open documentation.

      This is my point - availability is not enough, products wont just magically happen just because someone is selling cheap chips. Rasppi happened ONLY because people inside Broadcom invested their own time to be a buffer between bunch of closed source dicks and community.

      --
      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    28. Re:A Little Late? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      But they've been losing a whole market segment that they had initially gained - at the expense of MIPS and Pentiums. Last time, they were there in Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii. Now, Xbox & PS3 are both going AMD, and I dunno about Nintendo. That's not good news for a platform that started out well w/ RS/6000 workstations, PowerMacs and PREP systems, then lost them, then won some game systems, then lost that, and is now there only in some high end IBM servers. Power.org does list some vendors who do make PPCs, but who uses them?

      RTFA, looks like Google will be using them in datacenters, where POWER has improved its power consumption, and will be getting the performance/W that it needs. In terms of the OS, Google can easily port Chromium OS or a server version of it there, and run them on POWER clusters. I'm glad to see a potential revival there - I'm not happy about the x64-ARM duopoly that currently exists. Hopefully, if that catches on, lower power POWER chips can be made to go into at least tablets, if not phones.

      As for 'open sourced', IBM could make some HDL models at older process geometries available - which is providing the source code. Any chipmaker can take that and start working on shrinks, and add logic that either keeps power consumption low, or increases either execution units or L1 cache on the CPU. Open source in these cases can mean that the original designs can have their behavioral HDL models published, w/o publishing their structural modeling, since that is implementation specific and some leeway can be provided to vendors to come out w/ any structural model whose behavioral model matches it. Remember, the HDLs are going to change going from fab to fab, or even different fabs within the same company. So it's good enough if Power.org publishes behavioral models as part of specifications, and then leaves the rest to vendors as implementation specific details.

    29. Re:A Little Late? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      IBM actually promotes PowerLinux for server, datacenter & cloud solutions. IIRC, AIX is now just there for legacy sites that started off w/ it when it was the only option for the RS6k

    30. Re:A Little Late? by Plumpaquatsch · · Score: 1

      Show me the powerpc roadmap and we can talk about advantages. x86, hell even sparc has a decent roadmap these days, there is no roadmap for power because the architecture has no future. They open up the product now because they are aware of it too.

      Roadmaps are just security blankets for PHBs - all vaporware once showed up on a roadmap.

      --
      Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
    31. Re:A Little Late? by StuffMaster · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure the Power architecture was well ahead of Intel and AMD. Apple switched because IBM couldn't/wouldn't get the heat and power draw low enough for laptops.

  3. Compiler support good for general PPC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I recently got computing time on a BlueGene/Q (PowerPC A2) and I needed to run my C++ program on it. The compiler support was atrocious. It uses OpenMP for parallelization. GCC is damn slow on it and LLVM does not support parallelization using OpenMP. The IBM in-house compilers are crappy too for anything besides Fortran or baseline C.

    My question is: Is it like that also for the more "general purpose" PowerPCs? If yes, I really hope nobody licenses it. IBM supercomputers really do not deserve the TOP XXX titles they get, unless IBM commits to develop better compilers or better yet: scrap vacpp / xlc++ and just start fresh with LLVM.

    Posting as AC, as I do want to get computing time on other clusters still.

    1. Re:Compiler support good for general PPC? by elfprince13 · · Score: 2

      From the perspective of most supercomputer users, the problem here is that you want to use something which is not Fortran or C. Very little hardcore numerical stuff is done outside of those two languages. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it is the reason why there's so little incentive to have good compiler support.

    2. Re:Compiler support good for general PPC? by robthebloke · · Score: 1

      The compiler support was atrocious.

      Visual C++ is the best compiler I've used for PPC. (It's a shame that's not available outside of the 360 devkit).

    3. Re:Compiler support good for general PPC? by Funk_dat69 · · Score: 2

      You can get the 'advance' toolchain. It's basically an upstream gnu toolchain, with a lot more optimizations and support for ppc chips.

      Looks like LLVM is getting improved as well.

      --
      FUNK!
    4. Re:Compiler support good for general PPC? by file_reaper · · Score: 1

      The standard compiler for the PowerPC Architecture is xLC which is made by IBM.

      xLC is supported on AIX and Linux and it has all the optimization features needed for BlueGene/Q and other big iron (inter-procedural analysis, auto-vector optimizations etc...)

  4. Nvidia... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nvidia is very excited about the prospects of marrying Power processors and Nvidia GPUs for both HPC and general purpose systems.

    Nvidia hasn't quite figured out how to get their thermal energy per square centimeter to the level of a nuclear reactor, so I'm sure opening up the POWER series of chips has them quite excited on that front.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    1. Re:Nvidia... by cold+fjord · · Score: 2

      Kirk: Do you think it will work?
      Spock: It will depend on what Mr. Scott can coax out of the systems.
      Kirk: Scotty, Spock thinks that if we can boost the precision of the sensors and overlay the data on the navigation computer we may be able to navigate through the interphase rift to escape the Tholian web. Can you do it?
      Scotty: Aye Captain. With that last maintenance overhaul at Star Base 11 our computers were updated with the new Multitronic GPU processors. For once I have the power.

      Power, the next frontier. These are the stories of the GPU maker Nvidia. Its 5 year mission: to boldly show what no graphics board has shown before.

      Brought to you by: Interplanetary Business Machines. When the label says Power by IBM, you'll know the performance will be out of this world.

       

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    2. Re:Nvidia... by Desler · · Score: 1

      Since when are two numbers "comparable" when one of them is 54 to 92 percent larger?

    3. Re:Nvidia... by iroll · · Score: 2

      When you're using a log scale?

      --
      Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
    4. Re:Nvidia... by Desler · · Score: 1

      LOL

  5. CPUs by Google... by peppepz · · Score: 2

    ...that spy^H anonymously profile your behaviour at the microcode level? I'll pass, x86 SMM is already evil enough for me.

    1. Re:CPUs by Google... by bunratty · · Score: 1

      If you wanted to subvert a processor in that way, it would be easiest to add a secret knock that would allow the attacker to run any code at all on it. And any CPU you buy can have such a secret knock built into it. I don't see any particular reason to trust one CPU manufacturer more than another. If you have some evidence that one is untrustworthy, please share it.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    2. Re: CPUs by Google... by peppepz · · Score: 1

      My comment was tongue-in-cheek. All current mainstream processors already have operating modes that allow the firmware to run code without the OS knowing (or having a way to know). But then no CPU vendor is, yet, in the market of collecting and analysing personal information.

  6. "Open Systems" by khundeck · · Score: 1

    I use a lot of IBM software and hardware on a daily basis. I /really/ feel like this is more of a 'corporate alliance' than an 'opening up' of their 'intellectual property."

    I guess I just dislike the fact it's called the "OpenPower Consortium". Somehow I feel it dilutes the word "open", which has a lot to free/libre.

    KPH

    1. Re:"Open Systems" by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      Somehow I feel it dilutes the word "open"

      You're thinking about it the wrong way. Consider instead:

      IBM are open to the idea of taking your money.

      That is the fundemental idea of openness behind it.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:"Open Systems" by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      no, it's more like the open API of Unix, open specs of Sparc. IBM finally doing something Sun had success with decades ago but not useful marketing ploy now. Too little way too late.

  7. Re:Let's crowdsource and make a PowerBerryPy by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    We could run Clasic Mac and Sillicon Graphics!

    Classic Mac and old Silicon Graphics machines did not use PowerPC. They used MC68k CPUs. Later Macs used PowerPC, but SGI never used them, going to 64-bit MIPS CPUs instead.

  8. The AIM alliance is back! by MacColossus · · Score: 2

    I can't wait for the return of Motorola Starmax, Umax Supermac and Power Computing's Power Tower Pro. I remember my Power Tower Pro was upgradeable to 1 GB of ram in 1997! Shut up and take my money!

    1. Re:The AIM alliance is back! by Virtucon · · Score: 1

      Great hardware until Apple killed them.

      --
      Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
    2. Re:The AIM alliance is back! by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Actually, when Apple killed that business, they should have ported BeOS to those boxes, and sold them. At that time, they still had a chance, given that Apple was still running System 7 based OSs on the PowerMacs. Instead, they simply folded completely. Another disappointment was Be discontinuing the BeBoxen

  9. Power Licensed by LoRdTAW · · Score: 4, Informative

    The headline and summary are confusing, Power is licensed and Power based chips are produced by third parties. Applied Micro (AMCC) along with Freescale make power core based CPU's/SoC's for embedded use and Xilinx has power cores in their high end Virtex 5 FPGA's. A-EON uses the AMCC Power CPU on mATX motherboards for modern Amiga systems. What they mean is that IBM is making it easier for others to license and adopt Power for their needs. Though the Gamecube, Wii, Wii-U, Xbox 360 and PS3 use power processors, they are all made by IBM like the Apple Power CPU's.

    Its good to see more RISC architectures that have been around for a while becoming more popular. The mobile market pretty much bought RISC back into the spotlight and is giving x86 a run for its money. And more interesting are the partners and the task Power is looking to solve: the cloud (I feel dirty using that phrase). Intel better watch out, with everyone pushing software as a service and mainfr^H^H^H cloud computing, companies are looking to create hardware targeted towards those tasks while also reducing power.

    1. Re:Power Licensed by afidel · · Score: 1

      Is this about POWER or PowerPC? There's a significant difference and I seriously doubt IBM is going to risk that sweet, sweet large system revenue by allowing others to produce POWER based CPU's.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re:Power Licensed by SoupIsGood+Food · · Score: 2

      I believe the intention is to make the high-end POWER chips more ubiquitous in the server room - heavy duty RISC/Unix(Linux) server platform. The intention is to squeeze x86 out of the datacenter with AMD systems at the low end, and POWER-based gear for the serious number crunchers.

      IBM hopes that by bringing competitors into their platform, they can use economies of scale to make their systems more cost-competitive, and name recognition to separate themselves from the other POWER platform providers. Reduce the cost advantage of Intel-based gear and eliminate the single-source disadvantage of POWER, and they'll put some more daylight between themselves and HP and Dell, their closest rivals.

    3. Re:Power Licensed by LoRdTAW · · Score: 2

      Its confusing because different Power architecture versions may support both PowerPC and Power ISA's or PowerPc or Power only. Power 1/2 evolved into PowerPC which was renamed to Power ISA. Both Freescale and AMCC call their processors Power processors and support the Power ISA v.2.03 spec which also supports PowerPC. Newer Power ISA versions are called both PowerPC and Power, e.g. CPU's which comply with Power ISA v.2.05 are called POWER6 and the PowerPC 476. The latest power spec, Power ISA v.2.07, does not have a PowerPC name. So it can be confusing. Bottom line is PowerPC and Power are very close and in some cases interchangeable depending on how the code was compiled.

      From Wikipedia:

      PowerPC (short for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC â" Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Appleâ"IBMâ"Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been renamed Power ISA but lives on as a legacy trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture based processors.

      and:

      PowerPC is largely based on IBM's earlier POWER instruction set architecture, and retains a high level of compatibility with it; the architectures have remained close enough that the same programs and operating systems will run on both if some care is taken in preparation; newer chips in the POWER series implement the full PowerPC instruction set.

  10. Build a micro-itx motherboard with one soldered on by Marrow · · Score: 1

    You want to start a revolution, make the damn equipment simple and available.

    Build it and they will come.

  11. WRONG! by Funk_dat69 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Impressive. You are wrong on just about *everything* you wrote:

    >>POWER support is dead on all enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat dropped support with EL5.
    Nope and nope and nope

    >>Furthermore OpenPower boxes are contractually prohibited from running AIX.
    You are confusing this announcement with a previous attempt at the Linux market that was also called OpenPower. Those systems only ran Linux and could not run AIX. This announcement is about opening up the entire platform and licencing out parts or whole cores of the actual high end chips to companies like Google, who recognize that the single most expensive component in servers is the CPU - and they want choice and customization.

    >>You've got a box of hardware with nothing to run on it and it can only deliver half the performance of comparatively priced Intel equipment.
    The recently released Power7+ chip running Linux is the fastest thing on the market right now.

    >> If you outsource support to IBM, their support specialists in the delivery centers will accidentally nuke your whole frame during routine maintenance, and you could be down for days
    Umm..ok I'm stopping now

    --
    FUNK!
  12. Re:IS OS\2 NEXT ?? by cold+fjord · · Score: 1

    Actually OS/2 was 32 bit for quite some time before IBM discontinued it and Serenity Systems picked it up as eComStation.

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  13. Re:Is POWER dying? by Virtucon · · Score: 1

    Just like Sparc, the Power architecture is dead and Itanium will follow shortly thereafter. Why? Because the X86 architecture and X86-64 specifically has won the marketplace in terms of compatibility and cost. Sure, I may get 8 billion threads on a Sparc III but it's slow and for the price I can get a few few X86-64 boxes. ARM is now knocking on the door of the Data Center and we then may see a rush of specialized, disposable servers that are suited for a small number of purposes, highly optimized and which point X86-64 architectures may still have a niche but not as big of one moving forward.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  14. IBM won't ever change! by aglider · · Score: 1

    It's loo late, dude.
    25 years too late.

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
  15. Re:How is this any different from power.org by Funk_dat69 · · Score: 2

    Power.org manages the ppc ISA.
    The ppc ISA is and has been completely open. You can design and create your own chips based on it and people do.

    This is about opening up, or decomposing, the development of the high end POWER chips that IBM develops. Large data center companies have an increasing desire for customized chips. Customizing chips is not what Intel is good at or want to be good at. The only game box win that Intel had was the original XBOX and that was a massive failure, partly because of the inflexibility of Intel and their precious margins. I really can't think of any other custom wins that Intel has had since.

    If Google wants to cobble together a small 2-4 core Power Chip with exactly the parts they need, based on licensed pieces from IBM, and then go fab it at wherever is cheapest, I've got to think that will save them money versus being a mountain of retail Intel chips.

    --
    FUNK!
  16. Re:Day late, .... by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 1

    Hey, I still have some Mac System 9 floppies lying around. This should run those, right?

  17. What are you smoking? RHEL6 supports IBM Power by Chirs · · Score: 1

    http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/for-ibm-power/

  18. Re:Excellent news! by Cid+Highwind · · Score: 2

    Possibly, but it better have a snappy marketing name that conveys both it's hardcore POWER roots, and it's friendly personal computer approachability, and it needs to have a short acronym that can fit into the same column width as "x86" and "ARM" on benchmark charts.

    Maybe they could call it "PowerPC", or "PPC" for short...

    --
    0 1 - just my two bits
  19. Re:Let's crowdsource and make a PowerBerryPy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    There is OpenSPARC where you get IP cores, you also get the SPARC architecture license virtually for free and don't have to pay anyone if you actually should produce chips. ARM / Power are not open in the same way SPARC is.

  20. YUM, JFS, NUMA, DB2 by emil · · Score: 2

    A few words about Linux technologies that originated from solid positions within the IBM camp...

    YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) Yellowdog is a well-known RPM-based Linux distribution for the POWER architecture. JFS The OS/2 native filesystem was incorporated into Linux and released to production in June, 2001. NUMA IBM's acquisition of Sequent eventually led to NUMA code releases for the kernel which have been particularly appropriate for Hypertransport and QPI - high-performance Linux ows much to IBM. DB2 While not a free product, the UDB database is likely the largest competetor/option to Oracle on Linux.

    Linux owes a great deal to IBM.

  21. Re:Build a micro-itx motherboard with one soldered by swamp+boy · · Score: 1

    and affordable!

  22. Re:Let's crowdsource and make a PowerBerryPy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "Classic" Macs did indeed use PowerPC chips, if by "classic" you mean "Macs using an architecture prior to the current one".

    The originals were Motorola 68k. No Macs used the 68010, AFAIK. Only the Lisa did. But several Macs used the 020, 030, and 040. The Mac III was the last of the non-PPC Macs. The 68k Macs are considered "classic".

    The "PowerMac" generations were PowerPC, and there were 5 generations.

    Those retconned into "G1" used the PPC601. These were the famed "pizza box" Macs. These are considered "classic", since there was a massive performance difference between the 601 and the subsequent generation of PPC chips. Also, NuBus.

    Those in "G2" used PPC603 (integer only, but with power management) and PPC604 (FP coprocessor built-in, power hog). The clones were all in this generation. Clones are all "classic" since the program ended so abruptly. Other "G2" Macs are considered "classic" because they predate the G-whatever naming convention.

    Then the PowerMac G3 came out. This used the PPC750, which was built on the principles of the 603, but included a scaled-back FPU. Between the beige and blue/white releases of these Macs, there was a change in the OpenFirmware spec that resulted in a divide between "new world" and "old world" Macs. This caused "old world" PPC Macs (G1, G2, beige G3) to become "classic". To this day, you can't install Debian on an "old world" Mac. The blue/white models became "classic" when they were the last model without SIMD instructions needed to make slow-ass Macs capable of running any kind of heavy-computation (mostly graphics processing) software.

    "G4" was the MPC7400, which was an overclocked G3 with some SIMD instructions tacked on. It was only made by Motorola. It became a "classic" several times. First, the "Yikes" G4 was a blue/white G3 motherboard with a G4 chip on it. It was instantly a black sheep and became "classic" (read: old) within a few months of release. Second, the single processor G4's became "classics" when the dual processor ones were released. Third, the dual processor ones became "classics" when the gigahertz barrier was broken. They all became "classics" when the Intel Macs were released.

    "G5" was the PPC970. It's "classic" because it's not x86.

    The first Intel Macs were based on the Core architecture, and were 32-bit only. They were "classic" on release day, since the G5 had already ushered in the 64-bits-are-better-than-you attitude a couple of years before.

    Everything after that is probably not "classic"... yet.

    There are a lot of "classic" Macs, and for various reasons. Long-term product support is not Apple's strong suit.

  23. POWER, Power, and PowerPC by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1
    IBM and company's use of variously-capitalized forms of "Power" can be a bit confusing. When the RS/6000s first came out, IBM described the instruction set architecture they implemented as POWER, for "Performance Optimized With Enhanced RISC"; see the "IBM POWER Instruction Set Architecture" Wikipedia article and its references. Starting with the second-generation RS/6000 processor, they started naming the processors "POWERn" as well.

    PowerPC was an instruction set architecture based on the POWER ISA; a few instructions were removed, and a number were added; more were added to PowerPC over time. The POWER3 processor implemented the full 64-bit version of PowerPC, and I think it also implemented some of the POWER instructions removed from PowerPC. PowerPC ended up getting renamed "Power ISA" - not to be confused with the all-caps "POWER ISA" mentioned earlier - as part of the "Power Architecture".

    I don't know what stuff this consortium is dealing with. There's already Power.org for the Power Architecture, including the Power ISA. I'm guessing that this is for licensing the microarchitecture of the POWERn microprocessors; that seems to be what some of the articles are saying. Then again, some articles are calling it OpenPOWER and other articles are calling it OpenPower, so who knows?

    1. Re:POWER, Power, and PowerPC by file_reaper · · Score: 1

      Power.org is responsible for the Power Architecture ISA. (ie architecture)
      OpenPOWER will be the consortium which will license out the actual POWER Cores and associated peripherals.(ie microarchitecture and implementation)

    2. Re:POWER, Power, and PowerPC by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Why not have just one org - power.org, w/ its pithy URL - handle all of that? Have divisions within that org handle the stuff, if you need

  24. Amiga desktop? by Duncan+J+Murray · · Score: 1

    Anyone want to surmise whether we'll get a desktop machine anytime soon?

    Quite fancy a 5Ghz desktop beast running Amiga OS 4.

    Just imagine - Full - motion - video. Less than 0 second shutdowns. Deluxe paint loading quicker than you can thumb a floppy in.

    Or you could run ubuntu and have the dash load up in the time-frame your short-term memory works in.

    D

    1. Re:Amiga desktop? by Master+Moose · · Score: 1

      My 1st thoughts were to the Amiga.

      . . and while this news makes me hopeful, as an Amigain, I have learned not to get disappointed :)

      --
      . . .gone when the morning comes
  25. Re:IS OS\2 NEXT ?? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    OS/2 work is already underway as osFree, which uses the L4 microkernel at the bottom, and includes a PM personality. It can be a good OS for a POWER based computer.

  26. Re:Is POWER dying? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    SPARC has a rich suite of legacy Solaris applications, but Linux support for SPARC has dropped - RHEL no longer supports it, even OEL doesn't - one has to look to the likes of either Debian or OpenBSD. As a result, SPARC has been losing support, except for Oracle only houses.

    As for POWER, it's primarily an IBM platform for not just AIX but also i and other mainframe platforms. But even IBM has embraced Linux, promoting it for their servers, datacenters and cloud computing. Does IBM's POWER based HPC solutions use AIX or Linux? Either way, IBM's bets are hedged - AIX is still there for their legacy customers, while Linux is there for current users. If only SCO had been as wise and maintained OSE & UnixWare alongside Caldera OpenLinux.

    But then again, SPARC is more open in terms of no license fees needing to be paid to Oracle or anyone - something that OpenPower would have to do to catch up. MIPS too has to figure out a way to regain its popularity - in fact, it's the platform best capable of challenging ARM on the low power turf.

  27. Re:Is POWER dying? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    HP's mistake was acquiring the likes of Compaq & Tandem. Or, when they acquired Compaq, they should have spun off the DEC portion of it, so that they could have at least serviced their existing clientele and kept the OVMS/Alphas alive. Deciding to migrate to OVMS was the worst decision they made.